….. But I don’t Have Any Time For:
- Victor Davis Hanson (“Let’s Hope He Can Change“) — “Anyone who cares about the U.S., at home and overseas, must be worried, very worried, about the disastrous last two weeks.” Here’s a hopeful sign.
- From USA Today, on Obama’s first two weeks — “‘At first, I thought this was a vetting problem, but now I think it’s hubris — that they somehow think they’re so powerful and so popular that the normal rules don’t apply,‘ said Paul Light, an expert on presidential transitions and a professor at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.” There’s a term for this: The Punk Presidency. “Someone” called it on Election NIght.
- Larry Kudlow (“Time for Tim Geithner to Step Down, Too”) — “Geithner never answered the question put to him by senators Kyl and Bunning: Would he have paid his back taxes if he were not nominated to run the Treasury? His issue has never been resolved. He will never have the full trust of the country.” Update: National Review’s editors agree (“We must not have a two-tiered tax code. Obama should make a clean sweep of it and dismiss Geithner”). That would be a very smooth move.
- Judea Pearl, father of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, who was decapitated by jihadists on video seven years ago, had a must-read op-ed (HT The Tygrrr Express) in yesterday’s WSJ. Mr. Pearl’s key paragraph: “But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of ‘resistance,’ has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words ‘war on terror’ cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.” One Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, even called the War on Terror a “bumper sticker.” I don’t recall our current president, who ran against Edwards until February of last year, criticizing the former South Carolina senator for that statement.
- A NewsBusters post I put up last night criticized the Associated Press’s Ben Feller for over-the-top pity on our poor president after two stressful weeks on the job (“On a tough day, Obama escapes for a while”). Wait til you see what the first Michael Moore/Media Matters-inspired commenter had to say. Wait til you see how other commenters shredded him. I’m afraid Andrew Ian Dodge at Pajamas Media is right: “Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) will continue for a least a decade and probably more like two or three.” He observes that Brits are still going after Margaret Thatcher 20 years after she left the world stage; some loony lefties are trying to blame her for the country’s current credit crunch(!). That’s what you get for being involved with and winning a war for the good guys. In her case, it was the Cold War (the comment string at the linked 2006 post has the Cliff’s notes). In Bush’s case, it’s Iraq.